Basho Technologies takes aim at more enterprises with upgrades

A new version of Basho Technologies‘ increasingly popular Riak open-source NoSQL distributed database has added upgrades for enterprise customers, a growing area of interest for the Cambridge, Mass.-based company.

Basho supports Riak, a database that allows sites such as GitHub and Bump Technologies to store, replicate and retrieve data at scale, even when multiple nodes fail. As an open-source product, companies can adopt it easily after using legacy hardware to do similar work, and users have found it to be effective at a large scale. The next-generation feature upgrades have added to the original version by increasing bandwidth between databases in clusters as part of a premium data center replication service.

Delivering improved performance and higher bandwidth by allowing more than one transmission-control protocol (TCP) connection for the replication of data on clusters across data centers, the new version of the replication function is designed to meet the needs of customers operating the largest-scale systems. Riak 1.3 came about after what amounted to a rewrite of the original programming, said Andy Gross, Basho’s chief architect. Hundreds of companies employ the current replication feature, according to a Basho blog post, and can now roll out the new version.

Going forward, the company could very well add block storage capability, not unlike Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Block Store.

Whether or not that comes to pass, though, Basho has come a long way since its founding in 2008 in response to Amazon asking for a database that could support its cloud infrastructure.

Last year Basho came out with Riak Cloud Storage for companies that want to offer Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) compatible with AWS’ S3 storage product. It’s easy to understand why. The AWS application programming interface (API) is now the standard for cloud storage, as my colleague Barb Darrow wrote.

Through a spokeswoman, Basho reported several indicators of growth in the past year: The payroll has grown to 115 employees from 60. It has opened offices in London and Tokyo. And now 25 percent of Fortune 50 companies use Riak.

Basho’s chief technology officer, Justin Sheehy, will speak about why companies don’t need to put big-data strategies in place at the GigaOM Structure:Data conference on March 20-21 in New York.